‘I suspect there are creatures that can see the wind, though,’ he remarked sleepily.
‘I ’spect so too,’ she said softly. ‘I think I could, if I really tried hard enough. If I was very, oh very kind and gentle and polite to it, I think——’
‘Come and tell me quietly,’ Paul said with excitement. ‘I believe you’re right.’
He scented a delightful aventure. The child turned over on the grass twice, roller fashion, and landed against him, lying on her face with her chin in her hands and her heels clicking softly in the air.
She began to explain what she meant. ‘You must listen properly because it’s rather difficult to explain, you know’; he heard her breathing into his ear, and then her voice grew softer and fainter as she went on. Lower and lower it grew, murmuring like a distant mill-wheel, softer and softer; wonderful sentences and words all running gently into each other without pause, somewhere below ground. It began to sound far away, and it melted into the humming of the bees in the lime trees.... Once or twice it stopped altogether, Paul thought, so that he missed whole sentences.... Gaps came, gaps filled with no definite words, but only the inarticulate murmur of summer and summer life....
Then, without warning, he became conscious of a curious sinking sensation, as though the solid lawn beneath him had begun to undulate. The turf grew soft like air, and swam up over him in green waves till his head was covered. His ears became muffled; Nixie’s voice no longer reached him as something outside himself; it was within—curiously running, so to speak, with his blood. He sank deeper and deeper into a delicious, soothing medium that both covered and penetrated him.
The child had him by the hand, that was all he knew, then—a long sliding motion, and forgetfulness.
‘I’m off,’ he remembered thinking, ‘off at last into a real aventure!’
Down they sank, down, down; through soft darkness, and long, shadowy places, passing through endless scented caverns, and along dim avenues that stretched, for ever and ever it seemed, beneath the gloom of mighty trees. The air was cool and perfumed with earth. They were in some underworld, strangely muted, soundless, mysterious. It grew very dark.
‘Where are we, Nixie?’ He did not feel alarm; but a sense of wonder, touched delightfully by awe, had begun to send thrills along his nerves.